


Something Close to Understanding

by godcomplexfics (godtiercomplex)



Series: AmeChuWeek 2016 [1]
Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-17
Updated: 2016-07-17
Packaged: 2018-07-24 16:19:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,007
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7514941
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/godtiercomplex/pseuds/godcomplexfics
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Relationships are all about compromises, promises, and apologizing for failures to live up to promises.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Something Close to Understanding

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first time actively participating in a pairing week...! Weird when I've been around the Hetalia fandom since 2011~! 
> 
> So, I'd like to take this moment to say a few things. 
> 
> Thanks to Izzy for continuing to tolerate me and introducing me to this pairing.  
> Thanks to all my other friends for tolerating me writing so much for this pairing.  
> And thanks to you, the reader of this fic, for taking your time to read through this. 
> 
> Alllllright, please enjoy! 
> 
> Day #1: Color / Flowers

Alfred, Yao comes to understand, is a very physical person. He connects to people through touch rather than through words. That is not to say that Alfred does not talk, because he does. Alfred is constantly talking, and in motion. But, at the same time, Alfred is constantly _touching_ and _feeling_ and _needing to engage_ with his hands as if he cannot understand unless he maps something out with his own fingertips.

Like, right now, they’re sitting on Alfred’s couch and Alfred is playing with Yao’s fingers. The movie on tv is all but forgotten as Alfred memorizes his hands, maps out each callus on Yao’s palms. Then he compares their hand sizes and fingerprints.

“Are you that bored?” Yao asks after allowing this for the last third of the movie. It’s not a movie he was particularly interested in watching as much as he was in watching Alfred’s face and their hands meeting and separating.

“Where’d you get this scar?” Alfred asks after a glance up at his face from his position on Yao’s lap. He’s using Yao like his own personal pillow, and Yao finds it more endearing than annoying, so he allows it. He eyes the scar in question, and tries to recall where he got it from.

“Probably from a sword,” Yao finally says with a shrug. It’s a barely thin line on the back of his hand, and he can dimly recall for a moment raising his whole arm to defend his face from a blow. The memory is colored grey with the passage of time, the centuries that have come in between it forming and its retrieval now. He eyes down the rest of his arm, and the line continues, marring his skin. But it’s not alone in doing so. “Don’t tell me you’re going to ask about all of my scars, now.”

Alfred gets a look in his blue eyes, bright against the brown of his face, clear through his glasses. “Only the important ones,” he says.

Yao sighs, reclaiming one of his hands and carding fingers through Alfred’s blond hair, “There’s not much to say. I’m old. I went to war. Things… happened.”

“Things,” Alfred echoes. The credits stop rolling on the tv and something else comes on to replace it.  

“Things,” Yao says, “that don’t need to be shared.”

There’s a stubborn light in Alfred’s eyes before he closes them for a moment, and then looks at the tv. “All right.”

Yao was honestly expecting more of a fight, so he waits for a moment, lets his fingers pause in shifting through Alfred’s locks.

“What do you want to watch next?” Alfred asks. Yao resumes moving his fingers through Alfred’s hair and looks at the massive DVD collection next to the tv. There’s more movies on those walls that can be reasonably enjoyed in a lifetime, he knows. But they don’t live for a lifetime; they live beyond that and beyond even that.

“Let’s go for a walk,” he says instead of deciding.

“Right now?” Alfred asks.

“Mhm.”

* * *

It involves moving off the couch, and stretching out his legs. It involves finding his discarded jacket, and wrapping a red scarf around Alfred’s neck while Alfred tugs a blue knit cap down over Yao’s head. They lock up the condo, and step out onto the street. The sun is starting to set and casting the city into shades of orange and red. Alfred takes his hand, tucks it neatly into his pocket with his own, and starts walking.

They don’t talk, at first. Yao just takes in the building around them, trying to date them from the different material used. He takes in the sidewalk disappearing beneath their feet, slabs of gray being slowly broken down by shoots of green. Nature reclaiming what belongs to her. He takes in the people walking their dogs, or walking around while arguing on the phone. People hanging out on their front steps, smoking and gossiping with people on other steps. Alfred, like him, choose to live where his people live.

There’s not just English on these streets, as they walk, because this isn’t just a nation of one language. There’s a blend of languages as they bleed into one another. Yao takes it in, and he takes in everything else. The smells in the air as people start their dinner. The dark alleys they pass by that Alfred spares a glance towards occasionally, and the corner store they pass before finally, Alfred breaks the silence.

“Is it different?”  

“Is what different?” Yao asks, because there’s so much that Alfred’s saying and so much that he isn’t. Yao watches his face, because Yao is a visual learner. He learns by seeing.

“Being with me,” Alfred clarifies. But it’s not so much clarification, as it is a challenge, Yao feels. In order for Alfred to be different, then there has to be others that he’s being compared to. Others that Yao has measured Alfred up against. Does Alfred think he’s done that and found him, what, lacking?

Where does Alfred get these ideas from, honestly?

“Of course it’s different,” he settles on saying. The sun is setting lower, and now purples are being added to the mix of colors floating in the air. They’re walking in the direction of the sinking sun, he realizes.

“It’s different for me too.” Alfred says. His hand in Alfred’s pocket gets a squeeze, and then Alfred looks down at him. “I’ve been in wars too.”

“I know.”

The golden boy of the world looks almost embarrassed as he turns them down a sidestreet. “I know what it’s like,” Alfred insists. “So, you can tell me about… things.”

But, Yao really can’t. Alfred might know what it’s like to be in wars, but for most of those wars, the ones that really mattered, Alfred always, always came out on top. Isn’t that why he is where he is now? Golden boy of the world, loved and hated equally?

“Alfred…”

Alfred’s shoulders get a stubborn tilt to them, and his lips press together, and they march towards his goal. A park apparently. They settle down on a bench, and Yao gets his hand back.

“Are you mad?” Yao asks curiously.

“No,” Alfred says, but he’s looking away from Yao and he’s not touching him. “I just…”

“You just?”

“I wanted to know, you know? Like, about your scars, and your past, and your history. From your own lips, I wanted to know.”

“Alfred… just because I don’t want to share everything, doesn’t mean I won’t share some things.”

“But not the stuff that matters, right?”

“No, I’ll share the stuff that matters about who I am now. But you don’t need to know everything in order to understand me. You’re no more the entirety of your past than I am mines.”

Alfred considers that, and Yao considers the park. Due to the season, it’s dying. Slowly, but steadily, everything green is fading away into rich browns and oranges, and from there will fall to the ground, and from there will hibernate. A quiet, non permanent death. Yao wonders if Alfred has ever died.

Yao remembers dying, can remember it vividly, in memories that aren’t grey because they’ve featured in his nightmares so many times.

“Besides,” Yao says to try and make the situation lighter. “It’s not like I can remember everything in my past, anyway. I am old, after all.”

“Yeah, you are an old man,” Alfred agrees easily enough. He stands up and walks a bit aways. Yao pulls a face behind his back, and grins when Alfred looks back to catch him doing it.

Alfred bends down, and then comes back, cupping something in his hands. Yao looks at his face, and how serious he looks. It almost reminds him of the first time Alfred admitted to having feelings for him.

“We’re allowed to have secrets,” Yao says. “It’s impossible to know someone completely.”

Alfred laughs, and then tilts Yao’s head up with grass stained fingers, and tucks a flower behind his ear. Yao can’t see the flower, but he knows it’s there.

“Living forever comes with troubles, huh?” Alfred mutters, and Yao’s not sure if he’s supposed to respond to that or not.

“We’re not going to live forever,” Yao corrects him, gently, because he has seen nations rise and fall in all these many, many years. “But living as long as we do comes with complications, yes.”

Alfred sighs, and leans down to press their foreheads together.

Alfred, Yao knows, is a very physical person, and this is his version of a chaste kiss. An offering up of an apology for pushing Yao when he didn’t want to be pushed.

“I want to watch _Aladdin_.”

Alfred laughs. “Yeah, all right.”

* * *

 

They head back when the streetlights come on. Alfred orders pizza and Yao plays with the wildflower while he does that.

Falling in love with Alfred had never been something he’d planned to do, and honestly it scares him sometimes how much he does love him. He props himself up on the couch, head on one arm and feet almost reaching the other, as he twirls the red flower between his fingertips.

“You know,” he says, when Alfred gets off the phone and lifts his feet up and resettles them on his lap. He pauses, unsure of how to finish that. It sounds better in his head. _You know, you don’t need to know everything about me in order to love me. Just look at me as I am now, and love me for that._

“I know?”

“I really do love you, Alfred.”

Alfred looks at him and grins wide, with all his perfect, white teeth. “Of course you do.”

“You cocky brat.”

Alfred pats his legs. “You love me.”

Yao looks at the red wildflower in his hand, and looks at Alfred. He seems less tense than he was before their walk, and less prone to argue about things that don’t matter much. Yao presses the flower petals to his lips and kisses them. He knows the flower will be dried out in the morning, wasted away, but even still it’s lovely as it is now. For this moment, it’s perfect as it is.

“Heaven help me but I do,” Yao says finally.

Alfred flashes a grin at him.

* * *

Yao settles his nightshirt over his head, and can feel Alfred’s eyes on his back. He waits for a question about the scar that cuts across his skin. Instead he gets a kiss on his neck, and Alfred pulling him towards his bed after he turns off the lights. The only light in the room comes from the window. Moonlight spills across the sheets and across Alfred’s arms as they close around Yao.

“Okay,” Alfred says, as if they were in the middle of a conversation which they weren’t. “I get it. Your past is your past.”

“Mhm.”

“Then… can I have your future?”

Yao doesn’t know what to say to that. Alfred is quiet behind him, just waiting on his answer as Yao considers that.

“Are you asking me to marry you?” Yao asks because he needs to clarify what Alfred wants from him before he can give an answer. Marriage brings with it a host of headaches that Yao never wants to deal with. Marriage brings with it a host of complications that neither of them could ever deal with. Marriage is just… not something he wants, could want.

“Um, no? Not really?” Alfred doesn’t tense up as expected, instead he laughs against Yao’s shoulder. “Do nations even get married anymore…?”

“What are you asking me then?”

“To share your future with me.”

“All right,” Yao says, with a sigh of long suffering, because his boyfriend is just...“I’ll think about it.”

Alfred laughs. He kisses Yao’s shoulder and neck, and then he kisses Yao’s lips when Yao turns around in his arms and faces him. His blue eyes are the last thing Yao sees before he closes his eyes and kisses him back.

**Author's Note:**

> I don't think I did a very good job at following the prompt completely. There's def colors in there, def a flower, ahaha but they're not the center of the fic...I hope that's okay! 
> 
> Writing this took a lot of time and effort. I always have a hard time when following prompts. Ah, but in the end, this is the type of AmeChu I wanted to write the most! 
> 
> Please look forward to the rest of this week's prompts.


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